In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, some of Pinterest’s top executives discussed how the company has evolved since they joined the San Francisco startup. Here are some edited excerpts from the interviews:

Don Faul, joined Pinterest in May 2012 as Head of Operations, previously worked at Facebook:

“We were fortunate to have very early active engagement from businesses (but) we hadn’t taken steps to engage them. (So we wondered) how do we think of the relationship over time? Now we have pulled out that business function (into a separate team, which talks to businesses). In November, we announced tools for businesses that set the foundation for how we want to engage with businesses. And we’re investing in tools now to analyze data (on Pinterest engagement for businesses). We’re thinking about what solutions we can build for businesses and are talking to partners. Supporting business is a big priority for this year. If we’re going to be successful, businesses have to be super happy.”

Tim Kendall, joined Pinterest in the first half of 2012 as Head of Product, previously worked at Facebook:

“In late spring and summer (of 2012), our eye was on mobile. When we think about what users were doing, we knew we better exist on every platform. So the team built four apps — for the iPad, iPhone, Android tablet and Android phone — and launched in a single day (in August 2012).”
Businesses are “half the equation for Pinterest. We’ve got to show businesses our services create value for them. The natural next step is to provide ways to add more value and eventually charge for them.”

Jon “JJ” Jenkins, joined Pinterest in September 2012 as Head of Engineering, previously worked at Amazon:

“2012 was about scaling Pinterest’s infrastructure from a very small user base to a large user base. We were figuring out new architecture for servers and how they would talk to each other. We were indexing a growing number of pages and objects. There were some pretty significant technical challenges in terms of storage.

Over the course of the next year, we know people want the service to work faster and for it to be a highly available service.

(A goal) is the service has more value the more you interact with it. That’s what we’ll focus on — to increase interactions to give people better stuff (to discover).”